* THE 
INDWELLING 
SPLENDOR 



BY JOHN COLLIER 

MCMXI 






f^W 



COPYRIGHT, 191 1, BY JOHN COLLIER 



©CI.A29384 



/ >- f' 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

To Ardanna ix 

VISTAS FROM THE HIGHROAD 

Is It Enough ? 3 

Primavera 4 

Faith 5 

Francisco Ferrer 6 

Large Light 7 

Isadora Duncan 8 

Sunrise On Blood Mountain . . . .11 

Edwin Kendall Cutter . . . . . .12 

Crocus On the Appennines . . . . .12 

rhe Awakening . -. 13 

Leonardo Da Vinci 18 

The Larger Will 19 

Vista 19 

The Steel Mill 20 

The Holocaust of the Workers . . . .21 

Dust Over the City 23 

The Light Bearer 28 

Sheareth Israel 30 

The Garden of Lintoun 31 

The Awakening of the East . . . • 32 

The Garden 35 

The Hour of Peace 40 

Wind In the Bough 41 

THE ETERNAL FORGES 

The Eternal Forges 45 

Vain Heaven 47 

The Mystical Sufficiency 48 

V 



PAGE 

An Autumn Afternoon 49 

Free Joe 51 

The Indwelling Splendor 53 

The Immortal Hour 54 

Thanksgiving 56 

The World and the Individual . . . .58 

Deep Life 61 

Wind of the Spirit .63 

The Dark Weaver 64 

Gloaming 65 

Eire 67 

TO D. W. 
ToD. W 71 



THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR 



"A whisper of the secret tides upon another coast, 

The windy headlands of the soul, the lone sands of the mind." 

**And the Vision said unto me: 'I am as the centre, to the which 
all parts of the circumference bear an equal relation : but with thee 
it is not thus.' " — Dante : L« Vita Nuova. 



THE INDWELLING 
SPLENDOR 



TO ARDANNA 
I 

WORKER with me in this strange house of fire ! 
Lengthening my imperfections, while to thee 
I give temptation back, and sternly we 
Are held and whirled by duty and desire : 
With our deep doom our holiest hopes conspire. 

Our sin conspires in its ubiquity. 
We had tasted wells of pain, had seen the pyre 

Glow beyond shoreward waves, of childhood dead. 
Ere chance, that is one deed of Law Entire, 

Joined us who shall not part when earth is fled. 
Thence into life came our Eternity, 

And life on larger, statlier ways was led. 
We are dumb in joy ; but ah, what alchemy 
Makes gold at last the rudest path we tread ! 

II 

Grave Heart, constrained and myriad seem our days ; 
Yet the large eye sees only one lone ledge 
Scarred on a spray-stormed wall at ocean *s edge. 

One halting-place in migratory ways. 

And chance and change its imminent boundaries. 
Thence, O my Friend of winged heritage. 

We look into the yearning wondrous skies 

Unwavering : though the long detours may bear 

Us lonely through no gulfs the other flies ; 

Though lone transfigurations we may wear. 



And lone storm-battles in the stars may wage. 
And winged with alien passion we may flare 

Oblivious through dark dawns of distant age : 
Yet in the deep we are wed, our home is there. 

Ill 

For of the deep we are wed : ah, how we crave 

The meaning of that symbol called the grave ! 

Wed of the deep, a well-spring may we be 

For all realities of the salten sea. 

And salt our life and stern, and the grave dire ! 

For the sea rushes with all splendid fire. 

The grave is only Infinite Desire, 

And death the unheard, ineffable fleet tone 

Of Him, the Unseen and Sure, who cries the dawn. 

May we die deaths with all the days that fly. 

And may the springs be bitter till we die : 

May we bear well the burden which alone 

Gives wings to soar beside the living sun 

And in the purpose of the Nazarine 

Create anew what olden eyes have seen. 

Here on this distant, measureless, dark coast 

Rumorous with the sighing of worlds lost. 

We who, indissoluble, yearn to give 

Out of our weakness all that life may live. 

Claim but the human lot, kindled once more 

With fires that shone ten thousand years of yore 

For primal priest or in Gethsemane, 

Beacons around our wandering world today. 

IV 

Why do we who know 

Joy is the inner heart of the sundown. 
We who on earth below 

Would laugh away the old ascetic frown 



Till Life grow free; 

Why do we gaze into the onward years 
Of Life's eternity 

Whitening our April, still through a mist of tears? 

Ah, Comrade Mine, 

There never laughed a land Hke Greece of old. 
Pouring ripe wine 

Magnificently forth on sands of gold 

To the laughing God ! 

Yet never on fateful margin lorn and gray 
Of nemesis-mood. 

Moaned as in Greece of old the human lay ! 

They went with flowers 

And laughter and dance up to the Oracle, 
But the dim Powers 

Breathed in no sunlit sound their holy spell; 

And Greece, the Fountain, 

Flows for all life while onward ages crowd. 
For that its mountain 

Harbored the mist and drained the thunder-cloud; 

And Greece, the Portal, 

Shines evermore o'er laughing hosts that wait 
Glad and immortal 

Under the rainbow of tears and tragic fate. 

The Shadowy Pinion 

Sustained o'er Sappho and o'er Euripides, 
In dim dominion 

Endures, and binds our lowly lives to these. 

Whether God gave us 

Shadow at the heart that we might love the light; 
Whether to save us 

For Earth, our own Soul weds the unconquered night; 

xi 



Whether the Glory 

Lies nowhere hitherward of the shadowy tide 
And all our story 

Is homesick-haunted : Sorrow doth abide. 

But you, when darkling 

From out such eyes as dream beneath the fern 
By stream swift-sparkling, 

Comes your fawn-soul ; or when slow sunsets burn 

And under brows 

Earnest, and hair made luminous from the West, 
Your deep soul shows. 

You know what laughter crowneth all the rest. 



These are mere phantoms. You who saw the crowd 
Spreading one gala morn along a beach 
Rock-strewn, and Druid-old, and gray, and each 
Of all that Breton-gathering sang and flowed 
And was as tide-strown water, and how they glowed 

In colors that even memory scarce can teach 
And my words, never : you who saw that cloud 

Lighten in old-world heavens and fade away. 
Never to be recalled or understood. 

Although it feeds our wondering life for aye — 
You will receive these phantoms. Oh they reach 

In yearning toward the source of all our day ! 
Dreams, memory, mist of dawn ! Yet they beseech 
Faith for the mightiest hope that guides our way ! 



xu 



VISTAS FROM THE HIGHROAD 



Mistlike the long way wanders, 

Where far by ancient streams 
In dream the sower squanders 

Seed for our present dreams; 
Mistlike, which no man numbers. 

The conscript legions gray 
Stream through their waking slumbers: 

Their way becomes our way. 



IS IT ENOUGH ? 

I READ of the Alamo : 
In the desert, in the years 
That are melted like the snow. 
Where the ruined convent rears 

Lone above the indifferent plain, 
. Died the boldest of the bold. 
And a valor without stain 
Flared to glorious ashes cold. 

Only eighty years ago ! 

And as from another earth 
On the fervid Alamo 

Gazing past the gates of birth, 

"What the gain," I ask, "What use 
That for which the noblest died? 

Nature gathers but to loose. 

And her way is bland and wide. 

**In the mystic ways of her 
Whose impulsive children, we. 

Shout like waves upon a bar 
Soon abandoned by the sea, 

"Cling like leaves upon the bough 
Till her own frosts give surcease. 

What are all our valors now. 
Lost in that indifferent Peace? 

* 'Texas free, or Mexico — 
When the ice is melting fast 

And the nations are in flow. 
What avails an epic past?" 



Then the question turns within. 

There is dream and rivalry 
Battling on my field to win. 

Fealties for which I would die. 

Jaimtily my life I bear. 

And if battle bugles sung 
And the banners were in air, 

I should spring as Crockett sprung. 

Fall as he among the dead. 
Silent in a shattered breach : 

So the earnest ages tread. 

Things to die for given each ! 



PRIMAVERA 

SHE came from one invisible place that each 
Dreamer shall dream of till his life is done. 
She brought the vision men will die to reach. 
Then went away to lands beyond the sun. 

As Botticelli went into the night 

Still rapt in thought of Her who came in Spring, 
So to the homesickness of human sight 

She beckons, all its days of wandering. 

These intuitions hover, flash and go. 

As holy seasons of remembered fire 
Rise upon earth again. We dream and know — 

There is a goal for such divine desire ! 



FAITH 

ET it fade, the old form 

Of our longing transcendant ! 
At the heart of the storm 
Bides one Power Defendant 
Which has locked in the atom and sealed in the star 
The meaning, the mission, of things as they are. 

Oh, that Power Defendant 

Hid away, long ago. 
Deep-involved yet resplendant. 

Those fountains which throw 
Through the chambers unsounded of spirit and brain. 
Lost yet ever returning, their mystical rain. 

We have ranged earth and heaven. 

But call it not Faith : 
N'er for doftrine was given 

That marvellous Breath 
Which in child as in sage, in all ages, each land 
Hears the fountain far-playing, feels the touch of a hand. 

And defying the cerement 

Which the mind in its toil. 
Sick with endless deferment 

Has weaved, which the moil 
Of the myriad fierce forces of life-on-its-way 
Have entangled, looks up to the zenith of day. 

And beyond a white portal 

Which the eye has not seen 
Finds a fountain immortal. 

And its murmur, its sheen 
Are the murmur, the fire, of that fountain aye blown 
Through life's own inmost chamber. Faith's objedl is 
done. 



T 



FRANCISCO FERRER 

Executed at Barcelona, October 13, 1909 

HEY shot him down, far off in ancient Spain. 

A gentle man, soft-voiced, and spirit-clear, 
A man like you and me, greater through pain. 
Holier, and happier far through conquered fear. 

They shot him down?, calm enemy of all wars. 
Herald of peace, who waged his lonely fight. 

They shot him down, cowards and murderers. 
They slew the herald, they cannot slay the light. 

Brothers, have we forgotten how late we dealt 

Fiercely, and wrenched the Southern Isles from Spain? 

I have seen Moro Castle, and I have knelt 
Where hundreds knelt never to rise again — 

Knelt as I knelt against a sun-warmed wall. 

Old-world, and harrowed with an old-world sign. 

Where brains were scattered with the leaden ball 
That bit the stone. And they had souls like mine ! 

He was an anarchist. Well, and so were we 
Who scourged Spain from the Caribbean shore. 

He fought at home, alone and terribly. 

What we drove from this West forevermore. 

He fought to save a nation from within. 

Grappled with monstrous vampires from the grave. 
Asked for his people what we need not win. 

Whose fathers won our freedom. Oh now they rave 

Dull, far-off, strange to us, those restless seas 
That broke our dungeon, and that are not done. 

Though feared and named by us as anarchies. 
Till the last mortal cavern sees the sun. 



And we, who cry because they shot him down — 
We are less happy, we have not conquered fear. 

Subtler, stranger our war which is not won. 
Oh that we had his epic chance and clear ! 

Oh that we heard a clarion-call, as they 

In old-world countries with their tangible foes ! 

We fight in multitudes and terribly 

And know not whither the endless battle goes. 

Only we bear a spark from earlier time. 

And in the simplified distance still may wait 

An age heroic, a clarion-call sublime. 

We are as bridges between Fate and Fate. 



LARGE LIGHT 

HINK, that no storm- wave e'er may shift 

One dreaming coral, far below. 
Till waves are laid and corals lift 
In snowlike shores more strong than snow. 



T 



Think, truly ! that all storms that rave. 
With thunder-light or whirlwind-leap. 

Drift quiet as a lapsing wave 

Across the enfolding heaven's deep. 

Then turn unto the magic glass 
And see large history taking form. 

With seas of waves that seethe and pass. 
With shattering of asonian storm : 

And, of that coral-lineage far 

One self-same link; and o'er that storm 
Lit by one same and changeless star; 

Find high thine heart, thy hope-fires warm. 



ISADORA DUNCAN 
I 

THE MODERN AGE 

O PRIESTESS of an unperish'd fire that glows 
To exstacy ere our mind can understand ! ^ 
O Life-Spring from a permanent stream that flows 
Even 'neath our famish' d land! 

We bless you for the mighty Thought you bring, ^• 
And for the dumb despairs your motions thrill 

To such glad life as in our dreams may sing. 
And which is singing still. 

W^ bless you for the token to us all 

You flash' d on our raised vision, through the dust 
Of staggering hours. O Lode-Star beautiful 

In skies that are not lost ! 

O'er road that is not lost! O'er April lands 

Where rains dance through the tide of human flowers. 

And sunrise, and the work of human hands 
Fulfill unspeakable hours ! 

Oh not a dream ! Though when you went away 
Such silence fell as long we had not known. 

Who had forgotten Silence in the fray — 
Oh out of silence grown. 

And from your dancing, from the awakening reed '- 
Of unheard music, from the beckoning hand 

Of your sweet summons, rise the desires that lead 
Into your land, our land ! 



II 

THE PERSONAL CRY 

Oh you bring anguish to 

Our weariness. 
We who uprise to you. 

Weeping, to bless ! 

Lo, Isadora! We 

Out of our doom, j/' 
See your eternity. 

Thirst for your bloom: 

We who can only live. 
Bridges between 

All that you have to give- 
Worlds that have been. 

Worlds only quickening 
Now on the sky — 

Out of our hope they swing 
Measurelessly ! 



Ill 

THE world's great AGE 

<*The world's great age begins anew." 

Planted in melody 
Where pale and fair the morning grew 

In a forgotten sky. 
Came life : and still those faint fields are 
Germinal beneath the morning star; 

(And under starlight lies the sea 
And worlds of yonder mystery.) 



<*The world's great age begms anew." 

Oh it was yesterday 
The flutes of Grecian morning blew. 

And on a shining way 
The world* s great age was morning light. 
Then fell the rythm, then came the night: 

(Yet, starless, moved the music-stream. 
Far- thundering through dark deeps of dream. ) 

And came the night with deeper tone. 

Whose trembling spires touched the stars. 
And sweet and stern was music grown. 

And in a middle night of wars 
And vast discordancies, desire 
Was changed and sought dark heaven like fire ; 
(And on the yearning ocean-flood 
In wonder came the gleam of God.) 

*<The world's great age begins anew." 

Lo, Daughter of the Dawn, 
The rythm is fulfilled in you. 
And primal life hath gone 
Through day and dark, and winged with flame 
And subtler, it is still the same: 

(And on the flood, in surge and fire. 
Your music is a world's desire!) 



10 



SUNRISE ON BLOOD MOUNTAIN 

(From Boyhood) 

VAST landscapes, glimmering wide from marge 
to marge; 
Huge hills, like titans of unrestfiil dream ! 
Back and yet back they tower, away, away 
Far to the glimmering limit of the new-born day ; 
Range upon range they climb in purple majesty. 
The vales are mazed in mist : the cloud-banks gleam 
High to the central crimson, where the rays 
Of the unrisen sun do shimmer and stream. 
Vast winds, born in the dreamland of the dawn. 
Swell, roaring inward: leagues on forest leagues 
Blend their wild scent and sound .... 
The tide is full. 

The tide of glory past all fathoming. 
The vision of the everlasting God 
Forth-shadowed on the everlasting hills. 
Can rise no more .'. , . 

The concentrated splendor or a thousand days 
Climbs the triumphant east .... 
My God, my God, 

Fold me this moment home : too beautiful ! 
I am too glad to live : I know Thou livest ! 



II 



EDWIN KENDALL CUTTER 

YOU were like a mined temple, a citadel 
Reft from some unremembered quake of 
earth. 
When I found you, holding grim and perilous mirth 
And haunted as a ruin with romance-spell. 
What strange commingling of gnarled shapes from hell 
With sudden laughter of waters or child-mirth. 
With amplitude of a Karnak-pillar's girth. 
With red decay trailed through the Hellenic will ! 

To have found you, seeing with you the lightnings thrill 

Even around your dissolution-day 
In genius futile though indomitable. 

Was to have trodden with Virgil a Dante's way. 
To mark with Dante the unmitigable 

Movement of consequence through humanity. 



CROCUS ON THE APPENNINES 

*'The ground-flame of the crocus breaks the mould." — Tennyion 

IS AW that yesterday. And now the wind 
Blows on this mountain-platform of soft flame 
Which is the crocus, its whole life defined. 
Now who shall name the Name 

And give some mystic spell release, to come 
And gently waft this sublimating fire 

Into yon deepening sky, which is its home. 
The heaven of its desire? 



12 



THE AWAKENING 

**And Life shall be swallowed up in Victory" 

I 

HOW shall it be when that cold cycle comes 
In the aeonian movement slowly drawn. 
Far-gathering into purpose, flowing on 
Through all its starlit hours and pregnant glooms: 
How shall it be when all this furnace-fire. 
The throbbing iron, the overpowering brain 
Whose tempered prow sows wide the phosphoric main 
Sinks in the sunrise wave, its funeral pyre ? 
We are in exstacy: lo, wide and deep. 
Radiant with humanness, its mystery 

Burgeoning into powers that Man may guide. 
Gathers the Purpose. Up from nebulous sleep 
Winging into the dawn viftoriously. 

Come the world-brothers to our welcoming side. 

II 

It is the dawn. No longer piteous prayer 
Low on the shadowy heaven builds its cloud. 
Piercing our dream, icy and tempest-plowed 

Brightens the ocean, and the East is there. 

It is the dawn. And we have waked, to know 
What many dawns on many seas before 
Have told, rifting the cloud that seemed the shore: 

There is no shore, far as these waters go. 

Thus shall it be ? . . . . the slow last cycle draws 
Nearer, and on a deck that floats at rest 
The Man is silent; all his viftory 

Vanished into the day; the weight of laws 
Full-known, slowly upon his being pressed : 
While calm and ordered sinks his argosy? 



13 



Ill 

Or in the chaos of a ruinous end, 

A palsied vain old age where all is haze. 
Where sullen winds blow down the leaden ways 

Of aye-interminable ocean, from no land 

And from no grandeur of infinitude. 

On mariners grown adventurers no more. 
Wailing for haven or rest, hurled to the roar 

Of torturous tides with sunsets red as blood 

And fierceness of the dreadful seas at last? 
Noble or all-ignoble vanity 

May be the wing of doom spread far and dark 

Over the drowning prow when time is past : 
But ah, has wisdom of mortality 

Gone ever as far as sails our mystic ark? 



IV 

On no conception of the possible 

Is borne God's migratory life-on-wing. 

But by a will beneath all wavering 
Which nerves the faint blind bird with miracle. 
On no fulfillment that may hope to be 

Save as are ashes after fire, is fed 

Our mortal love, lone-living through the dead. 
Immortal through death's huge eternity. 
Surely the cycle of the frozen end 

Draws nigh, and hero-thought shall not avail. 
Though it should sway the stars, to pilot home 
Toward any harbor the knowable laws forfend. 

But though the Loved were dead Love would not fail: 
We are transfigured only through our doom. 



H 



Far journeyings over an occult sea. 
Pale mutinies among a conscript host; 
And under that unreached eternal coast 

Of world-desire, the sorcerer-enemy 

Shed ever on the deck destroying rain. 

Or struck the pilot blind beside his wheel. 

Or sent the whirlwind, and the ship would reel 

Through a reft shore into a lonlier main. 

Ah did it seem a dream in all our days 
Of that long past, when only ship and sea 
And memory of stern toil and home's desire 

Endured, and those unmeasured ocean ways 
Receding into God's eternity 

Drew us who follow still the wings of fire ? 



VI 

Think, that unspeakable things have coiled among 
The feet of us who tread this solemn deck : 
Ribaldry tearing among hearts that break. 

And hearts betrayed, depraved to snakes of wrong. 

Yet think, from what abundance it was poured. 
The balm, the Life that came forever new. 
Lavish on deck and spar, a shining dew 

Primordial, yet in every drop was stored 

All heritage ... . of the past of thunder-light. 
Of hero-sailing through the mountain-tide. 

Of calm slow strength drunk from old quiet seas. 

And knowledge that endures these shapes of night 
Which we deny not, we who shall abide 

To chart new deeps even with the hand of these ! 



15 



VII 

No single sailing over changeless waves 

By changeless mariners on a changeless prow 

Is ours, this long lone voyage where still we flow. 

Not into one but in a million graves 

Gulfed and annihilated, has gone down 
The tragic wonder of the immortal child 
Who in a million resurredtions, wild 

With Viking power, and singing to the sun. 

Has risen above the last horizon-wave 

On prow that seemed the miracle-hand of God, 
With miracle in the drowned heart reborn ! 

Can lightning or the deep-sea cosmic grave 
Appall the conquerer of that Inner Flood 
Which to the outer flood is night to mom? 



VIII 

In a far zone upon the yonder bound. 

Where yet the jagged waters, bronzed and vast. 
Roam somberly against a sundown past. 

There on the deck a stranger child was found. 

The ocean was more stern and mightier 
On that dim day than it had ever seemed ; 
Confluent tides from all horizons streamed 

About the ship and heaved and palsied her. 

Bitterness was upon the *wildered throng; 
Bitterness and bewilderment struck dead 

The child, who spoke a wild and solemn rune. 

Who blessed the waters for their endless wrong 
And blessed the future for its eyes of lead 
Unanswering, gazing past the sun and moon. 



IX 



He blessed the doom. It was a doom of love. 
He said, but other love than they had guessed. 
Far, far away was any goal or rest. 

Not singly could the generations move 

Toward that still home besought in every prayer. 
Not singly could the bark of life behold 
That mystic place, although in deeps of old 

Purpose had launched it but to voyage there. 

And subtler words in antique symbol spoken 
Whispered that child, before they trampled him 
Upon the deck amid the bitter spray : 

There was no dream but it must first be broken ; 
Cloud was the melting shore-line of each dream ; 
Deeper than dream the loving purpose lay. 



Sometimes, when the mid-afternoon moves slow 

And waves move slow and all the storms are stilled 
Among invisible boughs and fields fulfilled — 

Deep-fruited boughs, fields like the furrowed snow, 

Still, hallowed, happy, soon hke snow to pass : 
Flushed is the deck, rapt is the deep, and we 
Are changed, till in our hearts eternity 

Grows mortal love, which night and distance was. 

Then are we as the urging of the wave ; 
Then are we as the passion of the foam ; 
Then are we as a root that tears asunder 

The bounds of a millenial-dusted grave; 

And God's own lightning lights the souls that roam, 
And o'er a dwindled sea they hear His thunder. 



XI 

Love on the deck; love on the wave. We know 
Through love, such music as of ocean's host 
Rolling to break upon no charted coast : 
No thought may reach where those long wave-worlds go. 
Waves which are Love alone. The ship is Love, 
And Love has laid his keel upon the night. 
And Love has willed the Light beyond the light. 
And Love has heard the music, rolled above 
His last impossible promise : how the home 
That can not be, shall front the total wave. 

The sunken ship, the death through Man made fair: 
Beyond a heaven of expiring foam. 

Radiant and mystic as the hope He gave 

To Man's Promethean soul — a God's love there! 



LEONARDO DA VINCI 

AC RAG where all things wild and strange may 
light; 
All prototypes and empyrean dreams. 
All thrilling prophecies of day or night. 

All cloud-winged sources of all human streams : 
Leonardo, master of the Renaissance, 

Embodiment of all it never won. 
Herald of centuries hurrying to enhance 

Its lord and theirs, the unsounded soul of man. 



i8 



THE LARGER WILL 

THAT is the mightier happiness. 
Which builds its life on life to-be 
And thrills its viftory-o'er-distress 
Toward margins of the farther sea : 
For even agony can bless. 

Now Life has grown Eternity. 

O Friend, we could speak so, if pain 
Filled the deep union of our soul 

As it hath filled and may again. 

Or should the drowning night-wave roll — 

But ah, hark now the undying stram. 

Here, where the stars light clear the scroll ! 



VISTA 

AT night one seeth 
L\ Farthest and fairest ; 
JL .m. Yon lone star freeth 

Light which thou wearest 
In gleaming jewel 

And dreaming eye: 

And deep night freeth. 
Beloved, the dearest 

Home-hope, which fleeth 
0*er welcome the nearest. 

For quenchless fuel 
To yon far sky. 



THE STEEL MILL 

HAUNTED, fiery castle stands 

On that dark plain the marsh enwinds. 

Over the breadth and night of lands 
Which haply some lone traveller finds. 
It guards a realm of wastes and winds. 



A 



From dongeon-keep to solemn tower 

Flame mounts and waves, flame pours and lives. 

In all that desert world one flower. 
Fervid and terrible, blows. It rives 
Locked earth with roots of steel. It gives 

Life to unmeasured deaths of stone 
And buried hosts of cosmic morn 

Who made the primal world their own 
In life of fire ere life was born. 
Then sank to prison-caves forlorn. 

There on the moat the lurid flash. 
The flood of orgy-light is poured;- 

Red from the wassail-hall, where crash 
Cups foamed with fire on brazen board. 
Gleams that exstatic, unloosed horde 

Of genii wrenched from bonds of death. 
Into this fortressed furnace hurled. 

From whom the molten streams of breath, 
Coerced and wrought, grown cold and fiirled. 
Shall build the cities of the world. 



THE HOLOCAUST OF THE WORKERS 

Washington Square, March 25, 191 1 

HERE as a precipice, stone on stone, 
Cloudward the walls loom high. 
Here is transfigured and alone 
The fugue wherein we die. 
In lives to fiery mammons thrown 
Without a curse or cry. 

No eye of God looks on this place 

Wherein is woven all 
The beauty of the human race 

With its most hideous fall. 
The iron heavens turned their face; 

Ours is an echoless call. 

Here is the wonder of our power 
Heaved high in walls that loom. 

Here is the radiance of our flower 
Charred in a chamel gloom. 

Here, in this monstrous twilight hour. 
For God there is no room. 

They came from distant desert ways 

To ours, a harvest shore. 
But the vindicative lightning plays 

Hideously evermore. 
And kindles in devouring blaze 

Our Harvest of the Poor. 

You and I, Brother, you and I, 
Who tread this modern road 

Where no veiled Fate beyond the sky 
Lashes with solemn goad. 

But soft and euphemistically 

Greed claims man's soul and blood, 

21 



You and I, Brother, we who are 

So sanguine with dawn-fire. 
Who * lashed our wagon to a star,* 

Whose blithe faiths never tire. 
It is we — we slid the murderous bar 

That sealed this cage and pyre. 

One hundred weary years, smce man 

Was made by faftories free ! 
One century, since the swift brain ran 

Through an eternity 
And man's millenium began. 

Which steam and steel decree: 

Now, in the Square of Washington, 

Beside the arch of peace, 
* Mid wealth heaped up to hide the sun. 

Where hum the million bees 
Raping earth's bloom till spring be done. 

Slaves to the might that frees. 

Now in white steam and ember-glow 

And rivers poured in spray 
And silent figures heaped below 

And crowds in holiday 
And sudden screams of maniac woe. 

We see Hell's naked way. 



22 



DUST OVER THE CITY 

I AM the soul of forests far. 
Realms that are dying the death of flame; 
And gray with me in the heavens are 
Beautiful things without a name : 
Forest life of the mystic lands. 

And glow on many an autumn mere. 
And ecstasy wrought by heavenly wands. 
Are ghosts with me in the twilight here. 

Oh I was kingly on my far wold 

Where only the wind sang deep and long. 
Wind and bird and the sounds untold 

Of the greenwood world in a wondrous song; 
Oh I was kingly and ancient there. 

On the mighty hill, the unmeasured plain 
That now is a ruin charred and sere 

While I drift, a cloud that has no rain. 

Rainless and ashen veil 

Over the cities of earth. 
Shaken from the fire-flail 

That frees no seed of birth. 
Fired by the human clan 

Whose jagged citadels gray. 
Homes and temples of man, 

I darken, drifting away ! 

Yonder the sea is pale and wide. 

And the Indian summer winds will bear 
My ashes to the unchanging tide 

Where neither fires nor forests are. 
But beauty as grave as mine and strange. 

The earthly glory and mystic peace 
Endure through waste and ravin and change ; 

But lo, I mourn for the human race ! 

23 



Theirs is the famished dream ! 

And theirs the fiery meed. 
In groves of the Soul supreme 

Where fires do rage indeed: 
Oh, mystery ! Aye and farthest 

They are drawn, with heaven* s desire. 
Yet into their heavenly harvest 

They loosen the scythe of fire ! 

Dust, now ! Gone toward the twilight sea ! 

But I summon the old earth's prophet-dream. 
And sad and vague it returns to me — 

The Armageddon of man and flame ! 
Yea, when the first volcano flared 

And launched the sorcery of wild fire 
On domes by the giant pine-kings reared. 

Dreaming on my imperial pyre 

I saw the vision of a sphere 

Rolling in space where thunders rolled. 
With cyclones through the boundless year. 

With seven-fold flame and glacial cold. 
I saw in watery deeps enorme 

How life was wrought from chemic war ; 
In dream I drank the poisoned storm 

And brewed the breath for lives that are. 

Stem as a tempest-tide. 

Firm as a frozen shore. 
Myriad, planet-wide 

Labored the life of yore. 
And forever, only the glory 

Of the still-uncreate soul 
Gave a meaning to the story. 

And Onward lay the goal ! 



24 



Dust of the primal grove, I dreamed, 

A world's dream, and a prophecy: 
Through storm and age a lightning gleamed. 

And in the lightning stumbled He, 
He that was age and all its power; 

And wand and wanton child he played ; 
And hope and crown of earth he wore ; 

And fierce and blind he raped and bled. 

Lo, I am part of earth that loves. 

And under him earth's back is bowed. 
Unresting, spurred by fire, he roves ; 

And darker than the famished cloud 
His waste would make of earth and me. 

Are smoke and storm about his soul. 
Who is as earth when anciently 

It froze or flamed fi-om pole to pole. 

Such was the coming of man. 

Such was the Soul that came. 
And the day of hope began — 

A new beginning of flame ! 
What is the deed he brings? 

Age upon age is gone. 
Yet still on conquering wings 

No eagle seeks the sun ! 

And I am part of earth that hopes. 

Pensive I drift above the homes 
He builds, and darkness where he gropes. 

I have endured unmeasured dooms. 
My world has travailed toward his year; 

Tempest I knew, and thirst, and frost. 
I feared not flame, but this I fear — 

Lest earth's primordial hope be lost. 



i5 



For in that dream of ancient war. 

When first the scythe of anguish clove 
My silent wolds of wind and star. 

Aisles of my continental grove, 
I saw indeed by light of fire 

How fires must rage till, wrought from these. 
Came last the utter world* s desire: 

The heart that loves, the eye that sees ; 

The soul that is the Law of Law, 

The benison and will of God, 
The hand that tames the tooth and claw 

And guides the fire and drives the flood; 
The brain whose awfiil power springs 

Not madly, like the blazmg doom 
Of conflagration, but on wings 

To waft a world* s migration home! 

But lo, he sees but outwardly. 

And lo, he loveth not the Whole. 
Lays he the doom of fire on me? 

He fires the fane of his own soul ! 
Wastes he the woodland, zone by zone. 

And leaves his children robbed of earth? 
He wastes what Christs have died to own. 

What human ages bore to birth. 

What lives of rapture and despair. 

And silent lives of patient deed. 
And long-enduring love and prayer 

Of wasted peoples dreamed and made ; 
More dear, more sacred far to me. 

Who am of earth the hope and love. 
Than all that blooms on land or sea. 

Or ashes of my blasted grove. 



z6 



Soul of the forests far. 
Dust on the infinite. 
Under the twilight star. 

Over the city's height. 
Over the rumorous ways 

Where the might of man makes 
thunder 
And man creates and slays 
' In dross and wonder ! 

Soul of the ruined things 

Garnered through aeons vast 
Mankind, the poet, sings. 

Mankind, the power, lays waste ; 
Here in the silent heaven 

Drifts a forgotten host 
Consumed and fire-riven. 

Loving and lost ! 



27 



THE LIGHT BEARER 

Charles Sprague Smith: Worker With the People: Pathfinder 

in Comparative Literature: Apostle of Free 

Responsibility. Died, 1910 

(epilogue) 

So — it is said, and well said : but the veil 
Is round thee, as it was in life before. 
And thou art gone, and we shall nevermore 
Know whence thou earnest nor whither blows thy sail. 
It rose in a fair morning below 

Our sea's horizon, and the wind that drove 
We knew not, nor the mystic hand that wove 
That ample sail or wrought that Viking prow. 
Dauntless you came, rich from invisible 

Lands far beyond the seas our life may know; 
Dauntless though wistful, O unwearied Soul, 
Known and unknown to us, seaward you go ! 

It is well said. How long we gathered round ! 
Even so our dim ancestral ages caught 
From earlier mariners flashes of white thought. 

Stammering the unknown words ; and turned and found 

The message all-unlearned, the herald sped : 
Yet in their bibles, in their sagas wan 
And hero-deeds the prophecy lived on — 

Radiant on timeless waves came back their dead ! 

All that we have they gave us, they as we 
Gathering, till long before the tale was told 

Their herald vanished o'er the mystic sea: — 
So thou art summoned to thy peers of old. 

Oh, now thy life begins. We do not plead 1 

To follow on thy lonely seaward path, > 

Knowing that in thy pure white sail the breath 

Of life is blown, toward worlds of other need. 



28 



But here thy life begins. Even while we bow 
Mourning for one who loved us utterly. 
We know that life has only dawned for thee. 

Who livest in our own souls that mourn thee now. 

What on thy ship that came across the seas 

Was borne, what hast thou left, God's mariner? 

Oh, seeds of new and rich eternities. 
Sown in the minds of men forevermore ! 

Even in our minds, who may not see the flower. 
Who will not see the fruit, but who may pass. 
Having seen only, darkly, through the glass 

Of love and hope and pain in this gray hour. 

Yet is thy seed sown. Well enough we know 
What mighty mission thou laid'st on us here 
And bade us in this field America, 

Singing and passionate, handle well the plow ! 

And we bear in our hands the Hfe of thee — 
Seeds of thy vision of the eagle's wings 

Unwearying of thine own democracy. 
Foreshadowing a world of Viking kings ! 



29 



SHEARETH ISRAEL 

(The Old Bowery Cemetery, the Pioneer Jewish Cemetery 
of America) 

UNDER the looming of these murky walls 
Which answer to the long street* s heedless roar. 
Thousandfold, endless, echoing evermore 
Over the waste graves and oblivious palls. 
Forget, yet memorable, he waits the doom. 
Forgotten : He ! From the grim old-world bans 
And lurid waste of dying Europe's wars. 
He lifted up his race's trampled bloom 
And planted it beneath the Western stars ! 
He carved our garden from the wilderness; 
He wrought with our forefathers, side by side. 
This heaven-strong temple, glorious-arched and wide. 
Our freedom! Now, forgotten : centuries press— 
Dust on the eyelids of the Jewish king ! 
Yet oh, America, remember ! spring 
Futures, far dawns those lone eyes wake to bless. 
Where prophecy of a world-peacefiilness 
Comes like a murmur on the wind of spring; 
Far fields that trampled unperished bloom doth dress. 
Thy fields, remembermg when their glad birds smg ! 



30 



THE GARDEN OF LINTOUN 

THERE on the plain, where the world's end is 
found, 
A cloister lies, which all men's feet may tread. 
Mountains and deserts guard the mystic ground. 
And oe'r its ways the unending years are led. 
Morning shines on the roofs embowered, the rill 
With cryptic shore carved long ere Greece was known; 
Prayer to the waning twilight heaven is blown ; 
4nd Shensi dreams, unrumored, unsought, and still. 

^h, still ! yet living in its life of life : 
Strange as the face of yonder quiet star. 
And warm with intimacy, patient, sure. 
Beauty more strong than my choked hour of strife. 
Reverence where I could only come to mar. 
And love, and verity that shall endure ! 



31 



THE AWAKENING OF THE EAST 
I 

THERE is a closed gate in the East, which few 
Have opened, and these few have scarce 
returned. 
Old roads of time that portal lead unto. 

White, graven ways an ancient sun has burned. 

No prison, and no spell that we may name. 

Holds them who like Lafcadio Hearn have gone 

Beyond the gate and past the court of flame 
That rarely Western eyes have looked upon. 

But a more strange and haunted prison swung 
Behind them, than the map of Asia shows. 

And mirage wrapt the Western brain and tongue. 
Between pale seas and Himalayan snows. 

No childhood of the race, like India, 

Calls the remembering soul to China's quest. 

Strange as the Martian shore, remote, bizarre. 
The Hidden Country takes millenial rest. 

And spells are round it, and the gate is closed. 
And from its racial font our mind must part 

Which seeks yon cloud, perfumed and wondrous-rosed, 
Inscrutable China's bland and subtle heart! 



II 

No other garden past an eyeless wall 
On any shore of human life has grown 

So ancient, orient-lush and tropical 

Yet supple and virile from a temperate sun. 



32 



No multitude of lives compound and deep 

And bound in immortal unity. 
Was ever stirred from undegenerate sleep 

Like these, and made with knowledge and power 
free. 

I see upon the sky beyond the waves 

Thundering beside our last wide western dune. 

Risen on red wings from ethnic wastes and graves. 
The Will of Asia, crowned with an occult moon. 

Dark with interior counsel, and illumined 
With lightnings lighted in the Occident, 

Which seemed invincible might to us who roamed 
And conquered, kings in arrogant strength content. 

We who have risen out of twilight, high 
In the swift incandescence of the brain. 

Have lost the lesson of the frirther sky. 
We stride a giant stallion without rein. 

We drift as chaff in the wind our genius bloweth ! 

Conquerers, in turn we are slaved and blind and 
maimed ! 
Our might despiseth what our deep heart knoweth ; 

Our lust is loosened, our racial wing is lamed ! 

We who have chained the elemental vast 

And made the devouring ocean serve us well. 

Have launched our falcon against the Asian Past, 
And the quarry nets her: Asia hath tamed our spell ! 

Haply our God shall chasten His wild West 

With Asia, till hypocrisy of soul. 
Which is a gnawing wolf against our breast. 

He bared; till pride shall flout, till greed shall prowl, 

33 



Unlicensed but approved, no more along 

These sacred ways that Christ and Darwin owned. 

Else drown our clamor in runic Asian song 
Rock-written ere Sophocles divinely moaned ! 

Low onward o'er Pacific mystery 

On patient skies the Asian wing is lain. 

And round its moon is lightning known to thee. 
Soul of the West, but not thy thunder-rain ! 

Thou shalt not perish. Fairest and Last-born ! 

Thou guard' St a cloister deep as China's own, 
A portal of mystery, an altar worn 

With primal rites. Thine incommunicate rune 

Endures, and thy redemption shall not fail; 

For thou shalt seek and honor thine own soul 
When from the vast and Asian wing in hail 

God's wrath shall loosen and His thunders roll! 



34 



THE GARDEN 

I KNOW a garden in starry height. 
Beyond the coves of the tree and fern. 
Its light is not as the valley's light: 
For smoky mountains at sunset burn 

Far toward the place where my garden lies; 

And many a hallowed range and dim 
Gives back the glimmer of olden skies 

To fall like dew by the garden's rim. 

A world removed and a place unknown : 
Around in numberless multitude. 

In hosts of forest and walls of stone. 

Earth's haunting memories drift and brood. 

A garden beyond the gates of day. 

Charmed out of age with a timeless rune 

Whose heart of ineffable prophecy 
Holds vigil on one far height alone ! 

There, 'mid a close that none may see, 
A cirque impalpable few may guess 

(And these will penetrate sacredly,) 
My garden blooms in the wilderness. 



Along Tusquittee the silent spurs 
Plunge, populous amid solitude. 

Where not the wing of an insect whirs. 
What life, prophetic and multitude ! 

And music to which the hours go 

Is wind in the shadowy height of trees. 



35 



And to all the suns the waters flow; 

And of one deep Heart the pulse is these. 



Along Tusquittee a Song is hurled. 

Rolled by the vast and dark hill-choir. 

Where is the Genesis of the World, 
Blazoned from fonts of primal fire. 

Tortured with ancient earthquake-blow. 

By rythmic sway immeasurable 
Made sonorous of the ocean-flow? 

Here in the hills is laid that scroll: 

Hills at the centre of the sea, 

(Which remembers not though laboring loud. 
And though still at heart as Eternity, 

Remembers not, while the wandering cloud 

Of continents builds in vanishing form;) 

Hills of the farthest inland reach. 
Recording still the Silurian storm 

That ground the shells on a vanished beach ! 



Upon Tusquittee the forest ends. 

And the track of heaven is overhead. 

Swiftly toward the horizon bends 

A field of grass. I am led — I am led- 

Out where the mighty mountain leaps ; 

Out to the place of remembering. 
To the summit where the moveless deeps 

Are seen, and the end of wandering. 



36 



Garden, O Garden, unnamed, unknown: 
All tenderness of the awful height. 

All tenderness of the last dim throne. 
Mountain or cloud at verge of night. 

Where the One Unnamed of whose life thou art 
Lingers in love as now on thee — 

Tenderness, and its solemn part 
Is thine, of purpose and mystery. 



And if by invisible gardeners laid— 

The mighty wind that is likest God, 
The mystic rains, and the light that said 

Live! and the sun*s life thrilled the sod- 
Titanic powers of the earlier day. 

And the winged ancient-inseft host 
Who tutored the dark rude earth to play 

And evoked these flowers that wave wind- 
tossed — 

Not less a garden, and memory 

Of earnest gardeners that wrought the wall 
And sowed the beauty they should not see. 

Is mine, this garden and type of all. 

Only because of powers divine 

Called by whatever name, from gleam 

Of ether-light to desire of mine. 

Is garden or gardener aught but dream. 

Far hence, on mountain slowly wrought. 
With a vaster, stranger world beneath. 

In an un-dreamed garden loved and sought. 
Some flickering leaf is my life and death. 



37 



Now is the garden's haunting hour. 

Luminous, jewelled darkness flows 
Through gulfs uncompassable. Before, 

Vast and remote the mountains rose. 

Purple upland or amber cloud 
Beneath a sky that alone held all. 

Changed now is the titan crowd: 
Plumbless now as an ocean, fall 

Dead-black deeps from the garden's verge. 
And the verge is dusted with light of stars. 

And like a world's wall climbs a surge 
Out of the ocean's night. There jars 

Thirst of nothingness with the steep 
Quickening fire of the rapturous dome. 

And on the bound of the no6lurne deep 
The mountainous waters pile and roam. 

And they are as near as heart can hold. 
And the symbol is given back to me. 

And one with these laboring hosts of old 
I hear the cry of Eternity. 



But the night is long, the visions wane. 

Dreams bear me down, I arise to dreams. 
Changed is the dark ocean's plain. 

Sunken. Only in pallid streams 

Far below on a gloaming breast. 

Stays a vestige of all that was. 
Faintly bounding a world at rest 

Shadows rise, where the great waves rose. 



For the daybreak travel* eternally. 

Rushing, soundless, a sky-foamed tide. 

Billowing into the exstacy 

Of waking worlds in a track world-wide: 

And far on my waiting heights alone, 

I know that my garden knows the dawn. 

The wind is a river to eastward blown : 
The whole air flows: on the dew- 
drenched lawn 

The twilight now as a wraith is pale. 

An intimate breath in the brush and grass 
Grows palpable. Ah but I cannot tell 

How I feel, how I know how the King- 
doms pass — 

The solemn Kingdoms of day and night. 
As of life and death, of the fall and spring. 

Self- veiled from their immanent Ruler's sight. 
The source and end of their wandering ! 



39 



THE HOUR OF PEACE 

STRANGELY comes vision to our gray twilight. 
Strangely it calls us from our well-loved fields. 
All day no air has blown. For many days 
The wind battled with lowering worlds of cloud. 
And sunlight is remembered old and far. 
Strangely comes vision to our quiet toil. 
A mouldering and an unknown breath respires 
From the bowed garden and uprooted weeds 
Tropic with ram that fell ere twilight grew. 
Gray twilight — no dead memories or names 
Haunt its soft spaces; it is we are held 
As ghosts in a sunken garden of dim dreams 
Hardly of past or future, or of God, 
But of an otherworld that waits for Him. 
We are sad, but not with aught desire grown vain ; 
We are bowed, but not with weight of yesterdays ; 
We are solemn — not with thought of worlds or pov/ers 
That are but shadows in the twilight now. 
We are happy — as a well of water flows 
In a sunken garden, careless of all change 
Or ruined stone or gardener gone to dust. 
Being fed from a far mountain's changeless store. 

Strangely comes vision; vague, and like the sigh 

Of a God in His own gray unreached twilight : 

All day He labored by a loom, with suns. 

Bright lightnings thridded through with ebon skeins. 

Incalculable thunders, and the fall 

Of single blades of grass in windless fields. 

Laughter of children, song on gala ways 

And moan of earth beside a homeless shore. 

He labored, knowing not the source or end. 

His handiwork yearned to Him, the God on high. 

He wrought with love but more obedience, 

40 



And yearned indeed toward some encompassing Will; 

And in the sense of mystery, the desire 

That is a light leaping the universe. 

The breath of all the gods laboring afar. 

Breath of the soul. He ceased awhile and sighed. 



WIND IN THE BOUGH 

WIND in the bough, 
'Tis an old old word you whisper and 
soon are still. 
And the word is quiet now 

As your rustling breathes on a shadowy lonlier hill. 

All the old old sound. 

While the grey leaves fall and the frost is gathering 
And pale is the leaf-strewn ground 

And faint clouds trail the moon in its wandering. 

Not of autumn alone. 

Nor the bough grown bare, the lite that is no more; 
For yours is the solemn moan 

Of an ocean roundmg the farthest unnamed shore. 

On its glimmering beach 

The stars are a quiet phosphorescent snow. 
And yours is the sound of each 

Dark tide that wells from a place I may not know. 



41 



THE ETERNAL FORGES 



IN THOUGHT OF ONE, TO WHOM IS COMMITTED 

ELEMENTAL FIRE 

FAR BEYOND REACH OF CIRCUMSTANCE, 

OBLIVION OR WILL 



"We must pass like smoke or Bve within the spirit's fire." 

— yE. 

<*The soul has little concern with our happiness or unhappiness." 

— Fiona Macleod. 

**I know there shall dawn a day 

— Is it here on homely earth? 
Is it yonder, worlds away, 

Where the strange and new have birth, 
That Power comes full in play?** 

— Robert Broivning. 



i 



THE ETERNAL FORGES 

THE Will that is wrought of us 
Asks not nor waits. 
Moving unsought of us. 
Blinding our way, named among men The Fates. 

The Fates weld and sunder us. 

We, molten in desire. 
The Fates wield the ponderous 

Hammer of Consequence by the anvil fire. 

There is that bound in us 

Craving the fire; 
And there is sound in us 

Echoing the anvil strokes that never tire. 

We are of hero-mould. 

Frail though we are: 
Frail were the saints of old. 

Frail, quenched evermore, quenchless as a star! 

Here is Existence 

Come to event. 
Here is all distance. 

Time without measure, in microcosm blent. 

All of our tenderness. 

Love's dawn-desire. 
Flower-faint slenderness. 

All are but inner gleams of the anvil fire. 

Horrors that blast us. 

Frailties that shame. 
Deaths that o'ercast us. 

Are but the tempering plunge or the core 
of flame. 



45 



There is no Highest 

Found not within 
This fire, and the nighest 

Stern stroke on the mystic anvil shapes 
good from sin. 

Joy, the maternal, 

Joy of love's eyes, 
Joy, the eternal 

Dream beatific, lives in this fire nor dies. 

Never a smithy flared 

With Norse-god* s fire 
Like to the smithy reared 

Dark on our mountain-land ot life's desire. 

There is no name for it. 

There is no place. 
But the Fates claim for it 

All we may own, all ore of the human race. 



i 



46 



VAIN HEAVEN 

WHEN we are spread before Thy seat, 
O God of Judgment at the end. 
And the cold God in Thee shall meet 
The fervent Gods in us that blend. 

Wilt Thou, O God by us conceived. 

Be equal to thy task unscanned : 
To vv^ed these whirlv^^inds Thou hast breathed 

Or calm these oceans they have fanned ? 

And wilt Thou save our souls, O God, 

And hoard them into ecstacy: 
But how shall fare the burning clod 

That is its own Eternity? 

How shalt Thou cope with prayers and stings 
Mortal, and earthen of the earth. 

Which beat their sad ensanguined wings 
Or labor through such bitter birth 

As brings the firstborn from the dead? 

Have these a place in Thy demesne, 
O God Whom colder hope hath made 

And less desiring eyes hath seen? 

O God, art Thou, the God on High, 
But as the strength of man at last : 

Which sees the extreme fires die 
And palely stirs an ashen past 

And lifts a gold from out the gray. 
And all forgets the streaming fire 

That was a furnace yesterday 
And is a dust of lost desire ? 

Awful, ineffable it seems. 

The past no dreamed-of God can raise. 
What memory or heaven of dreams 

Can hold a life's insatiate blaze? 

47 



THE MYSTICAL SUFFICIENCY 

BORNE by thy steadfastness, O Mother mine. 
Dark and most tender and most mighty mother, 
(Thou in the soul's abysm or that other 
Abyss of worlds in this large care of thine:) 

Borne by thy steadfastness our faint wings hover, 
O mother Nature of the dream divine. 

Lo, are we fallen from the vaster mood 
Wherein thy law and mother-love entwine 
And in doom's grape-field grows thy spirit- wine? 

Even there, where faints the homeless wailing plover. 
Mother of all weary wings, thy sheltering pine ! 

O Mystery, steadfast, dumb, profound as God, 
One symbol breathes of thee, one utter sign : 
The ancient, awful face of motherhood. 



48 



AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON 

ON these great hills doth sorrow rest 
I As round one withered leaf of all. 
Unto the autumn and the west 
They bow, where mystic trumpets call. 

The scope of this unmeasured wold 
That is our planet's eldest range. 

That flame and glacier cast of old. 

Bows like a leaf, and waits the change. 

Sorrow is on the beechen leaf. 

Sorrow is on the desert stones 
In height where vernal bloom or grief 

Comes never, but the autumn comes. 

They know, there heaved before the flood. 

Or ever life or leaf could hear 
The trumpet of the mystic God, 

How comes the autumn of the year ; 

They know, in kingdoms of the star. 
What boundless autumns have begun. 

What waning suns and worlds afar 

Have heard the summons and have gone. 

O human soul in autumn's hour. 

By leaves that fall and hills that gloom 

And by thine own mysterious power. 
Rise to thy glory and thy doom ! 

Out of the dumb and deep and vast. 
Intense the will of God is hurled. 

Through fiery night and cosmic past 
It strikes, and binds thee to the world. 

49 



The sad face and its mystery. 

The wandering face of autumn earth. 
Thine is the doom to make it free. 

Thou furnace of God's second birth: 

Till all the cycle shall be run; 

Till all the deeds of leaf and stone. 
Till all the lives of star and sun 

And thine, shall hear the trumpet tone. 

And from the impossible untold 
A mightier WOl shall flow like air 

And heap an autumn into gold. 
And sorrow shall be heaven there ! 

. . .f.Yet on the hills doth sorrow bow. 
The symbol hath a face of dole .... 

Sorrow desireth vision now .... 

A mystic trumpet strikes the soul .... 



50 



FREE JOE* 

SORROW of Lear, 
Helen, and Deirdre, 
Sorrow of the sea 
Without goal or home. 
Sorrow of the world> 
Of the twilight sky. 
And of kingly songs 
And kingly decay: 
All sorrows, to Christ's 
Gethsemane tears 
And Mary's sorrow 
On Jerusalem's hill: 
All sorrows, their depth. 
Their mystery, their hope. 
Their ineffable power. 
Are here in this sorrow. 
Free Joe's, of the lowly 
And sacred tale. 

Sorrow of the slave 

In twilight of time ; 

Sorrow of the free. 

When the bloom of the world 

In a day of our dreams 

Ripened, falls to decay. 

And the Lesser remains. 

And the vanishing, dear 

Irretrievable love. 

Which no heaven can regain. 

Lies m dust on the ground : 

Sorrow of one 

On the Caucasus, 

♦An earlier story by Joel Chandler Harris. 



Prometheus, vast 
Protagonist of Man, 
Guarding the fire 
Snatched out of heaven. 
The faithful, vain, 
Unmitigable love ! 
Here are the sorrows 
Of all the earth's tales. 
Here in Free Joe. 

Here in Free Joe 
Is Prometheus Unbound; 
Here the viftorious 
Love that compels 
God in His silence 
Beyond the stars 
To hearken to man. 
Here the supreme 
Effort of Being, 
Divinely desirous. 
To throv^r its arrow. 
Arrow of longing. 
To the further shore. 
Here the sorrow 
Whereon, as a pinion. 
Unwearying, undying. 
Patient forever. 
Through gyre on gyre 
Of the boundless whirl 
Of the ages of earth. 
The mystical purpose 
Of Being climbs. 

Here the Bible 
Of humankind. 
Ever re-written 

52 



Through humble lives 
In the deathless glory 
Of silent love : 
Of the One Defeated 
And All-Viftorious, 
One and Homeless 
And only Home ! 
Here in Free Joe. 



THE INDWELLING SPLENDOR 

THE indwelling splendor of the life of man 
Makes nothing vain, when once his eyes 
have seen 

Its pulsing fire along the searchless plan 

Broider the night with lightnings high and keen. 
Rain on impregnable walls its arrowing sheen. 

And through old anguish beacon still his clan. 

He is weary, yea, in wisdom bows he down : 
He is dust of famished hopes, chaff of vain fears : 

Deathless he is through inner light alone. 
Lightening with gleam of undefeated spears 
And warrior banners through his mist of tears. 

Aye the indwelling purpose claims its own — 

Splendor of primal purpose, deeplier known 
Than any chance or fate that bind his years. 



5? 



THE IMMORTAL HOUR* 

ENCHANTRESS! Keeper of the unbodied 
spaces, of lives enthralled ! Show me your face, 
behind the glowing veil ; speak your word, and 
set me free for yet a little while. 

Have I eaten the poppy and heard the siren sing, or 
only drunk of the old dew of honey of all love, of beauty 
of all beauty? I have loved Vivien, who is indeed Etain; 
and Dalua, he, the futile, the starry divinity of madness, 
has entered my soul grown large enough for him. 

On your walls. Enchantress, is the red morning-glory, 
but moonflowers are there in bloom through the twilight 
day. The morning-glory is Vivien .... it is Beauty; the 
moonflower is Etain, Divine Unrest. I, Eochaidh, and 
I, Dalua — they are loved of me. But I hear .... outside 
.... the rumor of the earth; I hear the ringing of arms, 
the trumpet sounds incessently ; the noise of poised emer- 
gencies dimly falls, as the noise of sea-battles goes down 
through silent gulfs, down to the gray splendor of the 
halls of the sea ... . 

Enchantress, you cannot bid Dalua to the outer stars 
once more; you cannot unsay the truth of the song, siren 
or holy, or quell the despair of the poppy, sweeter than 
all flowers or sunlit dreams. You, who evoke, you, who 
fatally bind, can undo .... nothing, evermore : your child 
is born. Enchantress ; now he is Life's child, not 
your own. 

But you can set me a little free from these too-many 
dreams, from this too-infinite pain .... you have taught 
me pain, I never knew pain before. You can free me a 

*Symbolism, in part, from drama by Fiona Macleod 

54 



span, from the immortal hour .... for those emergencies 
that cry, beyond the morning-glory wall, beyond the 
moonflower wall. 

Enchantress of the unbodied spaces, breathe one reve- 
lation, lay one touch of your hand. Show me your face, 
behind the glowing veil. Free me a little span .... In 
the more deep gleam of your own wisdom, be merciful 
to earth which calls .... be merciful to me ... . 



55 



THANKSGIVING 

THANKSGIVING? See! 
We are made gods through thirst for heavenly 
fire: 
Immortal spirits, yea 

Even through immortal longing, we are grown; 
Passion immortal we have drunken and known, 
God laying upon us His own heart's desire. 

Farther and higher 

By worlds we are gone, even in the days that fly. 

Thanks, that they tire 

Never, those strong wings that beat the golden dawn 

Wherethrough a million lives have plunged and gone 

Nightward, yet life's wing beats the shining sky! 

Thanks, though we die. 

That we are cast into God's passion-stream: 

God's passion-cry 

Still on the winds of wasted autumn blown. 

Still in the furrows of April sown. 

Cries through our mystery and morning-gleam. 

Cries through our dream ! 

We are upon the highroad of great Earth: 

Thanks, that they teem. 

Those strong enigmas of our father-years. 

Those dusts of hunger and those rains of tears. 

Those teeming sorrows by our doors of birth ! 

Thanks, infinite-worth. 

That God, since daybreak-birds began to call. 

With sweet grave mirth 

Laid in our hands — we, frightened and amazed, 

We, wonder-wrought when love's far sunfire blazed. 

We, wildly and supremely rendered thrall, 

56 



His Law of All. 

Pressed by the weight of sudden mystery 

Our faint hands fall : 

Yet thanks, that out ot the old and twilight sleep 

He has raised us, even His mystic fires to keep 

And be the bearers of His destiny ! 



57 



THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL 

I HOLD, dear friend of common aim. 
That we must follow to the end 
This arc, whose long ascent may bend 
Far out and past our personal dream. 
For man, not men, its splendors gleam: 

A world's way, scarce our own, we wend. 

You write, dear modern mystic Friend, 
That you have found a changeless way. 
Since heaven fulfills your common day. 
Since even your daily hopes transcend 
All possible light that life can lend: 
And you, surrendering earth, are free. 

You write, **Not mere tranquility. 
Such stoic groves as he, the cold 
And bright Lucretius sang of old; 

Nor vaporous dreams have conquered me — 

Such mystic sensuality. 

Inert nirvanas, fold on fold. 

Insidious as the curse of gold. 

As palsied India from her prime ! ' ' 
Ah, Friend, they haunt the waste of time 
Like clouds on dead horizons rolled. 
Like Memphian dust whose tale is told — 
Those faiths that made our world sublime ! 

Dream not they rose from weary dream. 
Pale dream of wearied wisdom, spent 
With lust or disillusionment 

Or oars against a hopeless stream. 

They rose by primal watch-fires* gleam. 
And where the sails of Jason went; 

They lit in tragic wonderment 

Those clans of daybreak, wierd and far, 

58 



Who locked their shields in tribal war 
And died, in their fierce faiths content. 
That men be Man, earth's creeds were sent. 

That men be Man, and man endure ! 

No raven of a world's despair. 

No faith-in-vain, seized e'er one limb 
Of earth's vast life-tree, gnarled and grim 
And glorious in the wide free air. 
Till seedless hung the bough and bare. 
And near at hand was winter's rime. 

Ours, Friend, a transcendental clime : 
Placid, and walled with prudent reed 
Which bends when blows the storm indeed. 

It harbors no resplendent crime. 

Nor jars its faint and misty chime 
With clangor of a warrior creed : 

But nourishes a peaceful meed 
Of spirit-faith, of subtler power 
Than those devouring faiths of yore. 
To wind the glowing skeins that lead 
Through pale warm labyrinths, cleansed and freed 
From terror of the Minotaur ! 

Then old Lucretius wiser far; 

Saved from the opiate fugue, from waste 

Coils of the sensual Indian mist; 
Kindlier than Semite priests we are. 
But ah, what weight of life they bore. 

Those dark religions of the past ! 

But ah, what potent bonds they cast 
On men, that life be builded ! We, 
Who nurse a personal destiny 
Through creeds our inner heart has guessed. 
Are stayed by peace and dream and rest : 
But they a world's eternity 

59 



Compelled, moulding remorselessly 
To human ends the heavenly goal. 
To racial scope the human soul; 

And ours the ultimate heresy. 

That fond false freedom of the free 

Which dares renounce the imperious Whole ! 

What faith, while onward ages roll. 
In glooms where subtler terrors creep. 
On waters of the lasting deep. 

Toward ice-floes of the unreached pole. 

In stern and burning self-control 
Its ethnic vigil still doth keep? 

Is this our mystic faith : to reap 

What saints of elder creeds have sown 
In furrows of a toil forgone; 

Merely to quaff the exstatic grape 

God planted ere He fell on sleep. 
Ere faith's primordial mission — 

To bind all ages into one 

Divine, unthinkable, onward stream — 
Grew dark, and faith was lost in dream ? 
By passion-flow, by seed and sun. 
By fatherhood, by strong goals unwon. 

Were marked those mighty creeds of time. 

And shall be marked those creeds sublime. 
Fresh, procreant creeds for worlds that cry 
Through famished years on deserts dry. 
Fierce thirsting worlds — in this our prime 
Of power and chaos, tiger and slime — 
That wait a lightning in the sky I 



60 



DEEP LIFE 

HOW brave, through all its wavering. 
Is this our life of flame-faint thrill. 
Our tremulous, our immutable. 
Our long and dumb- desiring will: 
Through all that Dante and Milton sing 
We bear our burden, and are still. 

The wmds are laden with our cry. 

And the unechoing deep is fed 

With rumor of our passion-tread. 

But where the instinftive soul is led 
No catarafts rave or lost waves sigh^ 

Nor any praise or prayer is said. 

For where the instinftive purpose lies 

There is no need of litany 

Or paen or dirge eternally: 

What need for speech has Deity, 
Self-piloted on eternal seas 

With purpose patient as the sea? 

To us it is a boon supreme 

That we are made as harp-chords loud 
Played by a player hid in cloud. 
Who draws our passion to the crowd 

Thronging his dark and holy dream. 
That we are seed for furrows plowed 

By plowmen veiled in mist and fire. 
Whose potencies in us are sealed; 
That lingering-warm though unrevealed 
A patient gardener guards our field ; 

Is crown enough for our desire. 
And goal for all of dream we yield. 

6i 



O lives of the unnumbered past. 

Through whom the nameless river flov/ed 

On whose vast voiceless waters glowed 

Only the silent lights of God : 
On rustling shoals were sometimes cast 

Your waves of phosphorescent load. 

Breaking the veils of deeper dark; 

But these, O lives, were not your law. 

The silent onward waters draw 

Toward something more divine in awe 
Than any phosphorescent spark 

That Christ or Plato lived or saw. 



62 



WIND OF THE SPIRIT 

I KNOW not how much, how little I shall know. 
There came a wmd upon the mountain lone 
Of life. It had companioned God, and known ; 
And ever, strong and glad, the sweet winds blow 
From somewhere off beyond eternal snow. 

And all that I may know from thence is blown. 
For now through all the world, by ruined stone 

Of homestead from whose door the life is fled 
Or iron coast where all the wrecks are thrown. 
Travels that wind among the hopeless dead. 
Where it goes, there along the world I go. 

Be it by sodden field, harvest or bloom. 
And though I came beside my first hope's tomb, 
I should be glad, knowing the wind doth know. 



6, 



THE DARK WEAVER 

HOW Mystery, at her dark and intricate loom. 
Weaves her unnumbered, her unending 
threads : 

Her shuttle bears our luminous golds and reds 
Of human life; it bears our skeins of gloom. 
The weaving of her shuttle is our doom, 

Or bright, or dark. But follow where it leads ! 

And follow, careless of our personal creeds. 
Till haply some vast tapestry shall bloom 

In glory on some wide and mighty wall. 

O'er subdued splendors of some echoing hall 
Where some grave Race shall tread a cloudy home ; 

And on our visionary ear may fall 

Indeed the romance of the Weaver of All, 
The Mystic One, risen from an outworn loom ! 



6< 



GLOAMING 

THERE is a flooded noon of pagan might. 
Complete, absorbed, with all the surface 
glow 
Of earth, meeting the crystal surface light. 
The lesser lights of earth that come and go 

Vacant of immortality or pain. 

And there is night whose wings are like the pall. 
Whose talons clasp the tragic hearts of men. 

And there is gloaming at the heart of all. 

There are three gloamings. One lies underneath 
A fane uncompassable of quarried stone. 

Sad legions, laboring through life and death. 
Have built this fane of mystery, rune by rune. 

And none hath told what Builder's is the plan. 
Though all have seen a Face in wizard gleam ; 

And round this home and altar-fane of man 

At daybreak-gloaming mounts the light of dream. 

Dawn-gloaming, when the builder stirs from sleep, 
Answermg the grave, supreme, unquestioned call, 

(A world of builders,) glows divine and deep. 
And heaven lightens on the labored wall. 

Elsewhere the second gloaming beautiful 
Waits, and for all the weary waits indeed. 

And the desirous, the insatiable 

Hold through its silent sway their inner creed. 

Their bold insanity of infinitude. 

On the great Fail, the old earth's living fane. 
They labor, as upon the homing road 

A wanderer goes, heedless of sun or rain, 

65 



Unto the fire and the hand of home. 

No idle builders of enigmal walls 
Are they who wait the vision that shall come 

When this, the sacramental gloaming falls. 

One gleaming rests, more primal than the dawn. 
Even the heart of twilight's vast desire. 

Its breath impelled the God who made the sun. 
It is the passion of the solar fire ; 

It is the cry afar that urges all 

Who war or build about that ancient pile. 
The world's long Deed, the altar mystical. 

Ever betrayed, which none can e*er defile. 

This gloaming has no time but evermore ; 

No place, but wondrously it fills the world ; 
No goal, yet rolls its wave on every shore ; 

No cause, yet never is its banner furled. 

It is a haunting shadow, yea a song 

That flies at dusk within a haunted wood; 

A loneliness that strikes where myriads throng, 
A sudden hope that pales all previous good; 

Even a hand that reaches from the dumb 
The deep, the gloaming universal Love 

And holds the impassioned Mortal to its doom 
And makes immortal all that breathe or move. 

Whether in prayer of solemn motherhood. 
Or passion of desiring, battling flame. 

Or ideal longing on the Mount of God, 
This gloaming stays, which none may know or name. 



66 



EIRE 

I LOOKED across the snow, blue as pale foam 
When phosphorescence glows on darkling shore. 
When faint floods whisper and the winds are dumb 
In wandering fields of the cold sea-flame flower. 
Then is the heart aware of magic power. 

Of plumed dominions on the eternal sea. 
Of haunting hunger on the dim still shore. 
So on the moonlit snow I witnessed thee : 

Only a shadow on the bridge of hoar 
Over dark waters ; nigh the porch of home ; 

Leaning with incantation to the lure 
Of unknown tides ; poignant with dream and doom ; 

And sorrow of the middle rosary 
Above; and on thy brow the Easter bloom. 



67 



TO D. W. 



F 



TO D. W. 

Died, 1906 
AR friend of mine. 

Aye in the thunderous summer noon remembered 
Or by the sign 
Of night and stars beyond a porch huge-timbered : 



Nay, many places. 

And through some kinship with the distant seas 
And stranger races. 

With me thou goest to the end of these. 

One deep desire. 

That is exhaustless as the wind that rolls 
From sunset fire 

On Achill's vast sea-mountain, filled our souls. 

I was a boy. 

Who travelled weeks across the solemn range 
Alone, in joy 

Seeking thee, finding thee in that old grange. 

Those haunting pines 

And purple concave of a planet's hills. 
On thee, the lines 

Of life were drawn, and dread, and pain that stills. 

And yet thy tone 

Could stir me like a waterfall at night 
Far yonder thrown 

Down breathless hollows lit with the moonlight. 

And in thine eye 

Hovered the lightning, the enhungered flame. 
Life, destiny — 

The world -thought drives me still, though thou art 
dream. 

71 



Far friend, when last 

I came from out the silent eastern way. 
Rested, and passed 

Alone and up the mountain-steps of day, 

I could not seem 

To put thee out of mind. There haunted me 
A call that came 

And haunts for aye the longing thought of thee. 

It drew me back. 

I found thee pallid as with spirit- wars. 
We could not speak 

Our thought, but gazed together at the stars. 

The doom of youth 

Was on me, and its helpless love and pain. 
Earth* s eldest truth 

Was thine. Helper who sought for help in vain ! 

Only once more 

I saw thee, when the roof-tree was crushed down. 
By a strange shore 

I found thee, lost to mountain-lands thine own. 

Unspeakable 

Sorrow, anguish of th"e shadowed soul. 
Ineffable 

Estrayed bewilderment ! You drained the whole 

Cup of defeat 

That life may blend. But when I found you there, 
How strange, how sweet. 

How infinite was your conquest of despair ! 

To the caress 

Of a returned, a frail but kindered hand. 
With buoyant stress 

You rose, and day came back upon the land : 

72 



Though Death stood near. 

His touch upon your shoulder lovingly. 
And all was there 

That was and is your immortality. 

I brought it back. 

That day. You knew that when I went again 
Horror would track 

Your steps and drag you to a final den. 

But the waves ran 

In whiteness eastward from a shining gate. 
*«Your way, your plan. 

Your life to live ! Go, and good-bye,'* you said. 

And my ship sailed- 

Far friend of mine, from life's last mystery 
You have not quailed. 

Yet are my potent friend on land and sea. 

Far vale and crest 

Through the world's centuries remembering, keep 
All that need rest 

Of you, who have no need of balm or sleep. 

I do not guess 

That on som.e plain ringed with eternal snow, 
Face to dear face 

Immortal, we shall meet as man may know; 

But lowering yonder. 

Gathers a surcharged dusk along the height 
That may not sunder 

For overlong our dream of day and night. 

Transfiguration 

Goes with you on some undiscernable way. 
And your elation 

Shakes like a lightning through my manhood's day. 

73 



I yearn to render 

From the vast fields some flower for your name. 
But oh. Defender 

Of Dream, it is you are flower and flowering flame; 

And deep this earth 

Grows, and in onward deeps of all fruition. 
In midnoon mirth 

And living will, wingeth your intuition. 



74 



PRINTED AND BOUND FOR JOHN COLLIER 
BYTHE STONE HOUSE PRESS, JOHNSVILLE, 
PENNSYLVANIA, DURING MAY AND JUNE, 
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ELEVEN 



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